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You sound pretty convinced that she will fail the way she's progressing. Have you ever entertained the thought that it may just be different for some people in life and that while N-Fe types could be called masters of avoiding the painful, some people need to experience it nonetheless to see it and to change then.

I sometimes noticed that it is a huge N arrogance to always think we know how it's done the right way, because the seemingly right way most often was only fitting for our own personalities

I am convinced. I have a very good track record with her. I've gone deep inside her head and know her like the inside of my glove. I've peeled back her defenses to the core, gently, temporarily. Our relationship is really great in that respect. There are no secrets. There is just this one thing. I wish I was wrong, but there is confirmation and confirmation, for years now.

I just had a lightbulb moment.

Her need for security is absolute, but not realizable. This self imposed prison is all about security. Feeling safe. And I know why, and now I know what to do.

I have to be honest with you, but your imagination to understand her to the core I find kinda frightening. I have the idea that you can really never understand a human that much that you think you know every move he'll make.

I really dont know your situation, but it sounds a bit like you'ld both need to work on yourselfs a bit

What you say and the way you say it makes me think if she's not resisting your thoughts, but rather your authority. Your description makes me think she's ISFJ. They hate being belittled by others telling them what they should do. They feel it's a judgement of their persona that people try to control their lives.

If that so, there might be a big misunderstanding in the basic values...
"She has a Phd in Literature and works as a nanny, for a family member. Her prison is shrinking."

Does she agree that it is a prison? As far as I know, INFJs are driven by individual growth. It is everything to them, and not being able to grow as an independant person would feel like a prison to them. But the opposite of freedom is not a prison. It's commitment. What if she's happy having committed herself to something? Such commitments might help people find their place in this world. She's working for a family member... you see it as a fear of letting go of family, or as a chain that's pulling her to take care of her family. But what if she sees a great opportunity to combine both work AND family?

She'll hit that iceberg she's heading towards and she will hit rock bottom, when even I have left her, and her prison finally closes on her throat and takes the air away she needs to breath... eventually, experience will teach her... but that is really painful to see in someone you care for.

Isn't this extremely arrogant and patronizing of you? You are saying that she's completely incapable of controlling her life, and that you are her only chance of rescue. I would understand if she sees you trying to completely dominate her. And that kind of feeling makes it very difficult to accept any thoughts from your side... no matter how reasonable they would be.

"The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine."
-Nikola Tesla

It's a clearly negotiated and consensual power exchange relationship. My authority, my dominance over her, these are things she wants. These are things that make her feel safe and protected. She is not happy with how her life is going. I would be happy if she were happy, but she isn't. She delegates blame, but it is always external, and something that cannot be changed. People she thinks are out for her without reason, institutions that by their very nature deny her a chance, so she doesn't even try, despite teaching being the job she dreams of. In this relationship, it is my job to control her life. The responsibility that I accepted and she gave, and part of that is kicking her ass out of her comfort zone. And I've done a good job so far. She's a much stronger woman than she used to be. There was a time when she was auto responsive, her submission a reflex. It more and more becomes something that she has control over, and I'm proud of her for that. I used to believe that her auto responsiveness to dominant energy was what had her build her cage. With the data at the time this made sense. That it was a means to protect herself from being taken advantage of.

Patronizing I am, in the sense that I give encouragement, positive reinforcement, feedback and financial support. And I am arrogant and stubborn when I think I am right. No doubt about that.

I've found this. I find it is stunningly accurate. This is basically what I have been telling her for two years.

The main driver to the ISFJ personality is Introverted Sensing, whose function is to define the properties of and locate and recognise the sometimes abstract and innate qualities of and between the objects of the outer world. If an ISFJs picture of the world is threatened by external influences, the ISFJ generally tries to shut such new information out of their lives. This is totally natural, and works well to protect the individual psyche from getting hurt. However, the ISFJ who exercises this type of self-protection regularly will become closed within a small and ever decreasing circle of those family and friends who do not actively disturb their increasingly narrow and rigid world view. They will always find justification for their own inappropriate behaviours, and will always find fault with the outside world for problems that they have in their lives. It will be difficult for them to maintain close personal relationships because they will have a negatively polarised and therefore limited ability to communicate outside of the box of their own security needs.

It all fits, the model of her personality makes sense, survives the reality check of her displayed behavior and emotional states. It also shows a path. A need for security denotes fear, the source of that fear is obvious to me, and the way to dealing with it is counseling. What she needs to do is beyond me and my abilities. I've always avoided that part of her. A sea of enormous size in her subconscious that on a map would be marked with dragons and explosives. What I can do, is send her to an expert, and hope for the best. And hope that it will not be as painful and frighting as I fear it will be.

I have to be honest with you, but your imagination to understand her to the core I find kinda frightening. I have the idea that you can really never understand a human that much that you think you know every move he'll make.

I really dont know your situation, but it sounds a bit like you'ld both need to work on yourselfs a bit

+1

Originally Posted by Habba

Isn't this extremely arrogant and patronizing of you? You are saying that she's completely incapable of controlling her life, and that you are her only chance of rescue. I would understand if she sees you trying to completely dominate her. And that kind of feeling makes it very difficult to accept any thoughts from your side... no matter how reasonable they would be.

And I learned something, myself. Infjs have this reputation of coming off as arrogant and stubborn when they KNOW they are right. And I can see where this perception comes from now. It's because of how intuition works. How can someone be stubborn when they are readily acceptance of change and growth? How do you resolve this contradiction?

Well, I get a piece of data. It lands on the desk of my consciousness. I look at it, under hellishly bright fluorescent light, and throw it into the back room of my subconscious, completely confident that little magical gnomes there will sort it within a constantly changing kaleidoscope of data evaluation and pattern recognition. Everything anyone does, says, every external action anyone ever takes is a reflection of the internal self. Emotion is rational, logical, bound by causality, just like everything else. If you absorb this data and place it inside a constantly evolving framework of pattern recognition and action prediction you eventually end up with a working model of a personality and the ability to predict them. The ability to really know them, deeply.

A previous relationship of mine evolved into these constant explosions of passion where I was seen as immovably stubborn. "THERE IS NOTHING THAT I CAN SAY TO YOU!" is a phrase that comes to mind when she gave up getting through to me, trying to convince me of something, giving up the fight. But I always thought, of course there is, there is tons you can say to sway me. An infinite possibility of words that would make me change my stance in a second, if you would step outside of your pattern and give me new data. The reason I do not seemingly accept what you are saying is because you aren't saying anything that I haven't expected of you, and already accept as part of your internal system that expresses itself outward in every expression that you make, and is as such part of the problem on a whole that is leading you down the path that you are on. I wasn't this harshly self aware back then, nor did I really understand how someone could perceive differently. I was amazed that they could not see what I saw, how they were unaware of the dynamics playing themselves out over and over on an infinite loop. Can you not see the future? It is right in front of you. IN YOUR FACE!

I gave up the fight with this one. I didn't know how to communicate what I saw in a way that she could see it. For 8 years I tried to convince her of her self destructive ways and did what I could to hold her up. As expected, she hit rock bottom after I left. She was a fighter, nicknamed by family and friends as The Tank. Never gave up, never surrendered, always self sacrificing for others. She was taken for granted and somehow nobody could see how it consumed her. As expected she ended up having a breakdown because of it. She ended in the hospital because of it. Burnt out psychologically, and physically. Her body simply shut down, saying enough is enough. No more, not ever.

She changed, then. At an unimaginable cost that she'll never recover from. And after her part in our dynamic tore us apart.

How I am not supposed to fight this when I see it, I don't know.

Now I have an understanding of sensing. What I had to do, was go into this back room of my subconscious and drag out individual pieces that shaped the changing states of the kaleidoscope of interconnected data for pattern recognition. That was really difficult for me. There is no light switch in there. And those little gremlins of my subconscious don't know how to organize for shit. My memory is mainly emotional, reconstructing events by impacts and changes in concepts rather than specific details. It's like trying to put paint back into a container after the picture has already been painted with it. If god is in the details, I'm doomed to burn in hell.

But I managed. Sitting down, taking notes, wracking my brain, enough specific examples to get through to her. Enough for her to draw from the past to the present. And I did it within an atmosphere of acceptance.

"If you don't stop being so understanding I'm never going to stop crying"

We're not at change yet. But she accepted that yes, there is a problem, and yes, I MIGHT be right about where it is heading, because enough of the course has been reconstructed with specific details outlining a linear progression, causality, for her to be able to see it, now, too. And because her body told her I was right even when she was still unbelieving. She said that if I wasn't hitting bullseyes all over the place, she wouldn't feel like this. Which is interesting... and sort of alien to me. I have a distant memory of what that used to be like. There is something soothing about the thought of being only aware of ones surface expressions of the subconscious. How it makes one feel physically. The jaw that clenches as a sign that something is up. The tip of the iceberg. It's much less complicated to deal with. And it's easy to understand how, with only that perception, one can fall into a pattern of avoidance. She doesn't want to accept it yet, that she has to seek help to do something about it, but accepting that she is on a self destructive path is a big first step, and one that makes me hopeful.

If you think you can never know someone like that... I'm going to tell the story of another infj I've met in another thread. One without values that I can see. A nihilist, perhaps. One with a deeper understanding than myself. Who didn't work with dynamics on an individual basis alone, but with groups. One much more... effective.